Mother 3

In 1996 Nintendo and HAL Laboratories planned to release a sequel to the quirky RPG series known as the Mother series in Japan (the game is caled Earthbound in the USA). It was well planned out and the project was headed by Shigesato Itoi, the same person who was involved in Mother 1 and 2 (and is commonly considered as the Japanese Dave Barry). The game continued in the unique, offbeat style of the past games of the Mother series, with various different elements all combined into one game.

The story of Mother 3 does not seem to link back to the past games in the series, despite the fact that the end of Mother 2 leads to a sequel. The story involved a small family living in a redneck-like community in the midwest. The main character appeared to be a cowboy known as Flint who had two twin sons, named Ryuka and Kraus. Flint also has a dog, Boney, who accompanies him around the town.

The story begins with a UFO crashing down nearby the town in which Flint lives. Flint goes out to investigate the noise. In the playable demo that was shown at tradeshows back in 1997, Flint went through various different landscapes, starting with usual RPG desert canyons and underground dungeons, but then the game swerved into a completely different direction, as a giant green dragon runs through the landscape and runs alongside a futuristic bullet train. This blend of various elements, from a redneck town to a bullet train, is something that one would see in the Mother series. The demo also showed other elements of Mother 3, such as a very interesting mine cart scene with Ryuka and Klaus riding through an old mine shaft. Finally, a rock band known as DCMC plays some nice music (nevertheless, I want my Runaway Five back!).

While the storyline was well planned, the development team was not used to working with 3D graphics. They had trouble developing it, and the game suffered delay after delay after delay. It ran into further delays when, around 1998, it was announced as one of the launch titles for the 64DD, a disk-drive attachment for the Nintendo 64 which planned to enhance games. As the 64DD met it's doom in Japan near the end of the Nintendo 64's life cycle, Mother 3 moved off of the list of new games. It made an appearance at another tradeshow in 1999, this time showing screenshots, a movie, and a playable demo. With this it looked as if the game would finally see the light of day.

All of these signs of completion were misleading, however. The game suffered further delays and finally, in late summer of 2000, it was announced that Mother 3 was cancelled. Gone. Dead. Kaput. The development team behind the game simply had too many problems making the game work as a whole and was ordered to disband and work on other projects. The team was also losing interest, as the then-upcoming Nintendo GameCube system was about to make the Nintendo 64 obsolete. Completed work on the game (what there was of it) was locked away in the Nintendo vault of unfinished games, joining Super Mario 64 2 and Starfox 2.

With the storyline complete and a lot of the graphic and mechanics behind the game somewhat complete, we might see the game completed and released someday. In fact in April 2003 an announcement of a Game Boy Advance port of Mother and Earthbound have sparked rumors that Mother 3 may not be too far off. Us Earthbounders can only hope. And if it does come out, Mr. Saturn had better be in it!

Mother 3 is now playable in the United States, thanks to a patch developed by a team of people associated with starmen.net, the self-proclaimed heart of Mother Internet fandom.

Servo5678's writeup is correct, based on what the game, then in development, was like in 2002; also, he's been fled for years, and I miss him. So I'm going to follow up from when he left off.

A GBA port of the game was indeed announced about a year after Servo's writeup, and was released in Japan in April 2006. Nintendo then proceeded to do the old Mother switcheroo and announce that there was to be no English translation. The English-speaking Mother cult proceeded from seething anger to clever hacking, and a team of translators and coders got together and began translating. They followed suit with what Shigesato Itoi had done with Super Smash Brothers Brawl, starting a blog in August 2007 that followed the game's development process.

There are a number of little things that are nice. For example, in Earthbound, the A button brought up the menu, where you could Talk to people or Check objects; you had to use the L button for a generic “interact” button. This is gone, and both A and L cause you to interact. And many more objects actually do something, at the very least a description, rather than just being background. The B button also causes you to dash, which is a much-needed improvement.

The battle system is both more streamlined and more deeply strategic than in M&E: character balance, spell acquisition, and gadgets are better thought out; the progression of food is smoother and MP-restoring foods are more powerful and common, although condiments are gone; extra party members are common until the entire party is collected. One little feature I love is that by tapping the A button in rhythm with the music, you can chain extra attacks onto your basic attack move; as you progress in the game, the rhythms you’re expected to perform are more complex and harder. However, you can at least double your attack damage with a perfect 16-hit combo, so it’s a skill worth learning.

The graphics are a lot better, while completely true to the style of previous games — Shigesato Itoi, the game’s creator and main designer, was a cartoonist before Mother; characters for Earthbound were drawn in pencil and then modeled in clay before being pixelized. There’s a lot more variation in character size and shape, and much more going on in the non-battle world (although the battle screen gets some refinements and animations). A lot more of the exposition is done through fairly detailed animations in the game world. A lot more things have visual representations, in menus, item descriptions, and so forth. It’s more an enormous number of nice touches and just better-made art than a transition to a fancy new graphical engine, and it works very well for Mother’s style. And there are a simply unbelievable number of sprites in the music scenes in this game.

That brings me to sound; it’s very good. There are lots more high-quality samples, which are used to good effect, both in the overworld and battle. Don’t worry, though: Shogo Sakai, the composer, has not altogether lost the sometimes dreamy, sometimes manically upbeat wave-only songs; he’s just supplanted it with some more traditionally MIDI-y music. Those of you who played Brawl in English no doubt are familiar with several themes from the game. Although there may not be as many truly catchy songs as last time around, it's fine for what it is, and the battle music fits the rhythm technique (very different from the rhythm method) well.

The writing and plot are very good; Ryuka and Klaus became Lucas and Claus, though Flint and Boney remained with their original names. Duster, the gimpy ninja, Princess Kumatora and Salsa the dancing monkey, and a panoply of interesting side characters and villains round out the cast. Part of the quality of the writing is due to the efforts of the translators, who managed to capture the Japanese such that it still feels like it has the writing style of Earthbound’s translation. The ludicrous monster names and pictures return, and they’re still as funny and ridiculous as ever.

I don’t want to say much at all about the plot, but it’s definitely up to snuff, and connected with Earthbound’s mysterious ending, and yes, there are Mr. Saturns. The freewheeling, gentle humor and underlying compassion returns, though there is a very dark side to Mother 3. In fact, Itoi has made it clear in interviews that several key plot points and, indeed, the game's final sequences and ending were originally intended to be extremely dark and unusually unafraid to confront themes no yet seen in video games; the fact that these were removed doesn't weaken the game, but makes for some enormously interesting post-game reading and perusing of unused sprites.

Mother 3 is most everything you want it to be. I say most because, of course, these kind of things are never fully up to your impossible expectations; but what’s missing isn’t so much something at fault with Mother 3 as the fact that it didn’t have equivalents for everything I loved about Earthbound. And I’m glad it didn’t. It was a different game, an evolution of the Mother series, and is so well-made that leaves me hopeful about the possibility of Nintendo offering Itoi a fourth game. Because if he makes it, I’ll be able to play it, whether or not Nintendo decides to deign English fans with an official translation.